Originally printed in Imprint, Fall & Winter 2000/2001, Volume 19, Number 2, The Associates of the Stanford University Libraries

Although unaware of it, Peter Rutledge Koch taught me the questions we should ask of the modern letterpress book. It was 1983 and Koch, then an emerging Bay Area printer, had arrived in San Francisco from Montana only four years earlier in search of stimulation that went beyond “cut-throat trout, deer steak, and Jack Daniels.” I was still a greenhorn librarian at Berkeley, oozing the easy cynicism of a graduate student and skeptical of whatever this mop-headed, bad-boy philosopher/printer would say to my seminar on printing. Armed with an archive of sketches, page pulls, proofs, binding dummies, and a newly printed book, Koch launched into a gunshot volley of literary criticism, design theory, strenuous self-confession, and philosophy. It was all color and texture and flow. Typography, he said, does not simply represent the words of the writer (Colette in this case as I recall), it conveys meaning. The paper, the binding, the entire structure of the book is not merely the container, but rather the transmitter. Those red silk headbands, naughty and suggestive, tucked into the black silky dress of a binding, were not decorative design choices they were interpretation. All of the traditional elements of the fine press book – typography, paper, design, and presentation – conspire with us in reading the text and placing it in a new context. Fine press printing goes beyond craftsmanship and aesthetics; it is a collaboration between text and printer across time and distance.

Why was this book made this way, and what does the making of it mean? Perhaps most of us do not approach letterpress books with these questions, but Peter Koch does. By way of that query, Koch has materialized into one of the leading modern printers and designers of the fine press book. In the past twenty-five years, he has produced scores of letterpress books and hundreds of broadsides under the imprints of Black Stone Press; Peter Rutledge Koch, Typographic Design; Peter and the Wolf Editions; Peter Koch, Printer; and Hormone Derange Editions. His portfolio treatment of Robinson Jeffers’ poetry and Wolf von dem Bussche’s photographs in Point Lobos (1987) has reached the status of a contemporary masterpiece. His recent work, certainly a departure from (or perhaps culmination of) his more traditional pieces, explores the book as an object as it moves forward in time from fourth-century BCE tablets to fifteenth-century printing to a modern medium. The themes are directly philosophical and abstract. Guy Davenport’s superb translation of fragments in Herakleitos (1990) and Thomas McEvilley’s selection of “performance pieces” in Diogenes: Defictions (1994) are both transported by books that are on the one hand a glory of typographical design and on the other a direct challenge to our notion of the book. Ever present over the years is a sly, often playful, intelligence, a healthy irreverence, and a superb sense of typography. The consistent feature of Koch’s work is that it is never predictable.

Geography and a sense of place are fundamental to Koch; his work is replete with western themes, images, and even found-objects from his native Montana and his adopted Bay Area. He came to printing not in California, but in Montana, and not by way of the letterpress tradition, but rather by way of philosophy, poetry, travel, honest drinking, and books. Born in 1943 into a deeply-rooted Montana family, Koch entered a place redolent with the struggles and triumphs of his ancestors: off in the distant landscape, mountains bearing the family name; in town, a university campus founded in part by his great-grandfather; in the surrounding wilderness, the forests and waters that challenged his grandfather, a forester whose anecdotal autobiography was recently published. Although his father, a photojournalist, died when Koch was an infant, he nevertheless set the measure for travel and discovery. By age eighteen, Koch was on the road with “Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller in my luggage.”

By the time he returned to Missoula to study at the University of Montana, Koch had tasted Europe and North Africa – urban, literary, artistic, and exotic. In 1971, with a freshly-minted B.A. in philosophy, he bolted to Paris and Amsterdam, stepped into the middle of the international surrealist movement, and emerged profoundly altered. The work of André Breton and Max Ernst reset Koch’s vision and reoriented his geography. With his funds depleted the sojourn fractured and Koch returned to Montana by way of a short stint at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory with a new sense of place within a familiar landscape. 

At the laboratory, Koch worked as a data analyst. Although systems interested him, he left when he realized he would need a Ph.D. in theoretical physics to go anywhere interesting in the job. Continuing his Wanderjahre, he found work in a Missoula bookstore to make the rent. “It was a country shelf bookstore that sold cigars, porn, and the Partisan Review to a clientele of mostly university professors.” His turnabout came as a kind of epiphany when, at a party at a friend’s house, Koch was approached by an “elderly gentleman” – a few years older than Koch is now – who introduced himself as a friend of his father’s. The man was Bill Forbis, a retired editor and writer at Time magazine, who invited Koch to visit him at his home in Missoula. In his basement studio, next to the word processor, was a large chunk of iron, an elegant machine. 

“What’s that?” Koch asked.

“It’s a printing press,” said Forbis.

“Does it work?”

“Work, hell, you can make money on it!”

“Those were the magic words. I knew right then that I would have one of those.”

Koch returned to Forbis’ studio a month later, eager to be taught the basics of how to print. “I haven’t got time,” Forbis informed him. “Get your own press!” Over the next year, Koch acquired type from the stock of the Fairfield Times and the Dillon Recorder, a fragment of a composing stone, and an 1899 Chandler & Price foot-treadle-operated platen press from the Ravailli Country Republican, and set up for business. (Koch continues to mine this rich source of typefaces, devices, and half-tone engraved plates for “typographical found-objects.”) 

Koch had come full circle. In 1974, he launched Montana Gothic, a poetry journal peppered with self-conscious objections to contemporary American culture and carrying contributions by the likes of Robert Bly, Charles Henri Ford, Michael Poage, and Opal Nations. To produce this vehicle of surrealist invective and western rebellion Koch founded the Black Stone Press – the first fine press imprint in Montana. Montana Gothic had all the elements of a Koch production: challenging poetry sensitively set on the page, integral use of illustration, and a highly personalized philosophical tone. Within a year of its appearance, the journal was awarded the Pushcart Prize for the Best of Small Presses. Although the publication was short-lived, the act of printing resonated. Following the demise of Montana Gothic in 1978, Koch continued to design and print on his Chandler & Price. 

Initial issues of Montana Gothic introduced the concept of “Deadstart,” borrowed from Koch’s brief experience as a data analyst. It is a notion that he has returned to over the course of his career. This technical term meaning to reboot, to abandon all previous established patterns and start anew, became his rallying cry for the recasting of assumptions, a manifesto against mundane modern life. Everyday life was a barrage of insults: “‘Reality’ has been reduced to an uninterrupted eight-lane highway leading straight to the Disneyland of harmless imitations and approved occupations.” By 1976 “Deadstart” resurfaced in Koch’s work as a credo to the vitality of life and poetry and a paean to the pivotal relationship between craftsmanship and art. From concept to action – Deadstart – Koch reset his life by relocating to San Francisco in 1978 and along with Shelley Hoyt, who was then his wife, reestablishing Black Stone Press at 393 Hayes Street.

Once again the ingredient of geography entered the mix. Leaving behind the inevitable moniker of “Montana Surrealist” and soon to assume the mantle of “California printer,” Koch reinterpreted his sense of place. Resist it as we might in this electronically flattened and culturally homogenized world, geography retains a curious persistence in defining us. Although in reality Koch is no more a “shoot-em-up” cowboy than he is a bloodline California printer, these often-applied labels nevertheless signal a visual vocabulary and a conceptual landscape that indeed tag Koch as the son of the wild west and the scion of the Bay Area printing tradition that fostered his work. “Place” is the element that makes Koch’s work elegant as well as startling, for he plays out on paper his struggle to embrace or reject his own personal geography. 

Almost immediately upon his arrival in San Francisco, Koch stepped into the high lineage of California printers. An apprenticeship with Adrian Wilson at the Press in Tuscany Alley and his association with Jack Stauffacher at the Greenwood Press baptized Koch in the Bay Area tradition. In a burst of productivity at the Black Stone Press, the Square Zero series of broadsides was launched, as was Adam Cornford’s Shooting Scripts. In 1979 Koch returned to the work of Michael Poage (whose book of poems, Born, inaugurated the Black Stone list in 1975) with the publication of his Handbook of Ornament, a sophisticated piece of design that sets the verse in a sea of white. It is a confident book, seemingly deliberate in its effort to stand fresh in the wave of a strong California tradition of printing. That Koch’s work avoided immediate reference to or mimicry of his California mentors speaks to his strong sense of art and place. The influence, however, of Everson, Wilson, and others is discernible. In choice of text, material, and design, Koch’s Point Lobos (1987) is a direct descendent of the exemplar of California printing: William Everson’s treatment of Jeffers’ poems in Granite and Cypress (1975). 

The assured, decisive printer of Point Lobos, though, had nearly ten years on the earnest, small-press phenom that appeared at Adrian Wilson’s door in 1978. Koch’s apprenticeship at the Press in Tuscany Alley re-initiated him to printing. When there soon followed his own commission to print John Rollin Ridge’s A Trumpet of Our Own, Koch wrestled with the possible reception of his work – and with the finicky response of his antique Colt’s Armory press: “I half-feared and half-expected that all the sophisticated San Francisco printed and big city bibliophiles would scrutinize most critically this production by the new kid on the block…so I was demanding near perfection from my old Colt’s.” Near perfection is what he achieved, and as Koch’s work matured he gained numerous commissions and design projects. At the same time, he continued to expand his contacts with those poets whose work would ultimately shape his work. The lessons at Tuscany Alley were not forgotten; after Adrian Wilson’s death Koch was appointed Master Printer at the Press in Tuscany Alley in 1989, by that time a teaching press associated with San Francisco State University.

By 1984 Koch was sufficiently established as a printer and designer to expand his shop. A large, garage-like loft in Oakland with plenty of press room and a balcony office provided the setting for his new venture: Peter Rutledge Koch, Typographic Design. He continued to issue works in association with the Book Club of California and the Roxburghe Club of San Francisco and strengthened what are now long-standing relationships with the University of San Francisco, The Bancroft Library at U. C. Berkeley, and the Stanford University Libraries. Each of these institutions has turned to Koch for the design and printing of keepsakes, broadsides, and exhibition catalogues. The Associates of the Stanford University Libraries have seen Koch’s design work and printing in numerous keepsakes and publications, beginning with a handlist for a Bender Room exhibition and including Cultural Landscapes: Gilbert White and The Natural History of Selborne, with essays by W. B. Carnochan and Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook (1989), * and Looking for Kafka by John Felstiner (1990).

In 1988 the Stanford University Libraries commissioned Koch to design and produce Lazar Fleishman’s exhibition catalogue Poetry and Revolution in Russia, 1905-1930. It was a complicated subject and a vexing design problem – poetry against a harsh backdrop of red and black elements. It was also Koch’s first full foray into computer-assisted design and the inauguration of the Adobe Garamond computer font, which had been designed using exemplars in Stanford’s Department of Special Collections. At our initial meeting about the catalogue, Koch proposed a cover design that played with Russian Constructivist motifs. “This is all about geometry and about type as a geometric object,” he proclaimed as he splayed out drawings and sketches of circles, squares, and words. “I particularly like that one,” I replied as I pointed to an expressive, colorful sketch on the wall, done in what appeared to be tempera. “Yes, it’s good, very good, but not what I intended.” Koch let this dangle for a good half hour before he revealed with great glee that I had selected the youthful work of his son Max, a father’s memento proudly taped to the wall. Koch’s better instincts prevailed, and the catalogue went on to receive an award for exhibition catalogue design.

All the while Koch played on an important strength and continued to produce beautifully realized poetry publications. Building on the cadre of poets he gathered through the Black Stone Press, Koch inducted to his list a savvy selection of new writers, many of them major poets of the period. Gary Snyder’s poems Tree Song (1986) and The Fates of Rocks and Trees (1986), for example, were designed by Koch as broadsides illustrated by Michael Mundy’s photographs. Over the years other writers would follow, including Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Thom Gunn, Czselaw Milosz, Pablo Neruda, and William Saroyan. Five Ripe Pears (1996), a short story by Saroyan with ten accompanying etchings by Joseph Goldyne, is perhaps one of Koch’s more accomplished fine press books, and a choice example of the inspiration he derives from collaboration. What often emerges on the page is the complex integration of word and image, sparked by the interplay of printer, artist, and writer. The ability to translate that subtle experience into a printed book, a material object, is Koch’s great strength as a printer. 

After one of my visits to the Oakland studio (sometime in the late 1980s), Koch handed me business card with his temporary summer address. He was off to Montana country for fly fishing and cowboy poetry. On the card, in place of “Peter Rutledge Koch,” an elegant line of display type read “Hormone Derange.” This perfect bit of Kochian impishness evolved into a new imprint: Hormone Derange Editions was established in 1991 when Koch relocated to Berkeley after the 1989 earthquake destroyed his studio. The illustrated broadsides that dominate the list resonate with cowboy themes and outlaw culture. They often make use of typographic ornaments, devices, and photographic plates as found-objects, and tease the viewer with the fictitious imprint Last Chance Gulch. Koch has even produced beer coasters, advertising the “Real West Coaster Company” and “Real Kick-Ass Letterpress Printing,” with images of bucking broncos and slogans promising that “Lead Ain’t Dead.” All this cleverness is a hook; behind it is serious work. The western design motifs, the literary stance of the publications, even the maverick attitude function almost as an outlet for Koch – an opportunity to vent the cultural accumulation of his past. Hormone Derange Editions allows Koch, as a printer, to reinterpret his past experience, to reinvestigate a sense of place as if he were embarked upon a circumnavigation of his own personal geography. He continues to come back around, much like the glyph of the snake biting its own tail (the Ouroboros) that Koch frequently employs as a printer’s mark.

The 1990s brought us Koch’s most innovative and difficult work. More complex and thoughtful, these books challenge the reader to look beyond the meaning of the text to embrace the object and the metaphor as a whole. Nowhere is this more evident than in his three-volume work Ur-text, a series that expands a poem Koch wrote in the 1970s, “Wordswords,” into a metaphorical reference to poetic language in the archetypal book. Volume 1 (1994), by look and feel, is a fifteenth-century book, bound in vellum and pigskin, the covers held closed by bone clasps. When opened – when revealed – the book immediately demands an investment on the part of the reader, for the superbly set Goudy text type simply plays out a repetition of “wordswordswords” throughout the entire text block. The initial temptation is to dismiss this as some clever post-modern gimmick – the book deconstructed to its most minimal function. But as we return to the work and accept the challenge, we begin to discover the poetry of the object. “It is not by accident,” Koch reassures us, “that the text creates a form devoid of all content but retains as ambiguous poetic sense.” Koch is striving to present us with the origins of poetic language, the Ur-text, in the form of a Renaissance exemplar “that only the angels can read.”

The second volume is still in production, but Volume 3 (1994) makes the direction of Koch’s mediation on the word quite clear. If the first volume of Ur-text is the state of poetic life at the origins of printing, then Volume 3 brings us to the present, a “corporate model where the imagination is shoved to the margins.” The same text is now encased in metal; the book's structure and workings are machined rather than crafted. The zinc cover is etched with the mesmerizing text, the spine expressed by brass rods and aluminum tubes. The modern book has stripped lyricism from the poetry of angels. We are left with a cold, machine-stamped product – Deadstart. Koch sees Dan Kelm’s binding as “a perfect resolution to the problem of articulating the impersonal machine-like elegance of the full metal jacket.” In recollecting the creation of Ur-text, Koch recalled that he had “found the margins to be the only place where poetry exists.” This epiphany may be exclusive to the poetic journey that Ur-text launches, but it could just as easily signify the quest Koch embarks upon each time he approaches the press – to find the poetry that lurks in the margins. 

Just as he explored the mutable nature of poetry with Ur-text, Koch played with the piercing character of semantics and expression in Diogenes: Defictions (1994). The publication of Diogenes continued Koch’s exploration of Pre-Socratic texts begun four years earlier with the release of Guy Davenport’s translation of Herakleitos (1990). Herakleitos’ aphorisms are austerely set in parallel Greek and English text. One of Koch’s finest pieces of typographical design, it is a fitting homage to the great San Francisco typographer Jack Stauffacher. Diogenes: Defictions, on the other hand, takes on a wildly different sensibility. The anecdotes or “performance pieces” of the Cynic Diogenes of Sinope are presented to us as a quasi-ancient artifact, or what Koch calls a “text transmission object.” Loose lead tablets scored with angular hand lettering are entombed in a rustic ceramic box. This is an object of another time; it speaks to an earlier means of recording and transmitting meaning – something, as Koch envisioned, that might have been buried in the city dump at Corinth. The appeal of the arch-Cynic Diogenes to Koch is apparent: Diogenes “The Dog” interpreted philosophy as a life-consuming action, a series of absurdist performances held up to the scrutiny of the people on the Athens streets on which he lived. His behavior as performance philosophy took the antithetical stance to the familiar, a sequence of nose-thumbing moments: “When Plato defined man as a featherless biped, Diogenes plucked a chicken and carried it into the lecture hall saying ‘Here is Plato’s man.’” Diogenes accused society in the same inclusive manner that the Montana Surrealists critiqued contemporary culture. Koch conveyed Diogenes’ gestures in the same fashion that curses were written at the time – on lead tablets, defixiones, rather than through lead type. 

Koch’s considered choice of typography is a hallmark of his work. He typically leans toward the materiality of typography – looking for letter forms and flow that are at once bold in their choice yet specific to the character and intent of the text. His is a reaction to what he calls the “crystal goblet school of typography,” a rejection of overly delicate and over-used typefaces that are “primarily Anglophile in nature.” In Diogenes: Defictions, for example, the angular, incised hand-lettering by Christopher Stinehour scars the lead tablets with Diogenes’ epigrams. This design sensibility recollects similar attention paid to a sense of cut stone and carved inscription in his designs for Point Lobos, in which Berthold Wolpe’s fonts Pegasus and Albertus were employed for the text and the legends. In both works typography is a tactile form in Koch’s hand – it speaks to the poet’s touchstone of nature, to the intonation of poetry, and to the ancient act of making verse. Robert Bringhurst, Canadian poet and typographer, writes of Koch’s typographical design with an eloquence that mirrors the grace of Koch’s work. In his 1988 Fine Print review of Point Lobos, Bringhurst captures the experience of reading Jeffers through the hands and eyes of Peter Koch: “The fact remains that Koch has set the standard for printing Robinson Jeffers: the standard for how the poet’s audience is permitted to see, to envision, the voice which carries the visions they have come to hear.” 

Consideration and balance are evident throughout Koch’s work, which over the years has cut a wide arc from simple, traditional elegance to on-the-edge innovation. Throughout the divergent styles of Koch’s work, his character is always present – not as an obstruction or over-indulgent overlay of the “printer as personality,” but as a persona, an interpreter, or, as he would have it, a “performance philosopher.” According to Koch it all comes down to “the question of a name.” “In the contemporary world,” he believes, “the profession of designer or artist supersedes that of printer.” With this sensibility, it is perhaps not surprising that Koch’s work – or at least the way he thinks about his work – spans such a wide array of thought, impulse, and vision. Koch presents himself through his work as an “Artist/Collaborationist, Designer/Printer, and Publisher,” and certainly more revealingly would cross-list himself under “Archeologist of the Book, Book Architect, Book as Object (Sculptor), Retrieved Dream Objects, Text Transmission Objects, Typographer/Printer to the Ur-text Project, (urban) Cowboy Surrealist.” Some of these appellations are present in various pieces by Koch, but his work is most intoxicating when all of these characters interact and collide in the creative process.

With the 1998 publication of Richard Wagener’s Zebra Noise with a flatted 7^th it appeared as if Koch had found that perfect moment of symbiosis. The whispers of past influences, the hard-won vision, and a tempered sense of past destination united to prompt Koch’s finest piece of work to date. Wagener, himself a son of the West, presents twenty-six tight, shirt fictions, momentary glimpses of the West, and illustrates them with a “biological alphabet” of twenty-six wood engravings. Koch places these within the vast vista of the page with elegance and assuredness. It is a work of maturity and grace. But we have come to expect an about-face from Koch, and one soon followed in the form of Hard Words, a series of large format digital Iris prints that employ scans of antique photoengraved plates and newspaper headline type. Ghostly images of early western settlers – inhabitants of Koch’s past – gaze blankly at us, their predicament captured and set by the large metal and wooden type into single word-objects: Broke, Froze, Hard, Lost, Shot, Dead, Gone. In a different context, Koch ventured that “the printer brings to the design and scope of the printed surface a consciousness of the materiality of signs: the sculptural aspect of language, language as object.” With each new work Koch journeys one step closer to his own Ur-text, placing the signs, the objects, into a familiar locale. His sojourn gives words – and us – a long-needed sense of place.

 Mark Dimunation is Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress. Prior to this, he served as Curator of Rare Books and Associate Director for Collections at Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections and as Assistant Head of Acquisitions at The Bancroft Library. From 1983-1991, Mark served in various capacities, including Rare Books Librarian, in Stanford University Libraries’ Department of Special Collections.

* The Associates opened the exhibition with a reception on Sunday, October 15, 1989, and the Loma Prieta earthquake closed it unceremoniously two days later. Those who missed the opening will have another chance to view it in Cultural Landscapes: ... The Bicentennial Exhibit Revisited, on display in the Bing Wing of Green Library from February 4 through April 8, 2001.